Oilman is now senator's aide. (Herb Johnson, chief of staff of Sen. James Inhofe)

A lot of independent oil and natural gas producers work hard at being politically active, but it's not often you hear that one of them has taken a full-time job to run a U.S. senator's office. Herb Johnson fits into the latter category, which is what makes this story unique.

At 66 years old, the Oklahoma producer, who's spent a great deal of his adult life working on political campaigns, never thought he would be offered a job in the new Congress. That was until his close friend of 30 years, newly elected Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe, called him after the November elections.

"I was installing a compressor on a gas well and my mobile phone rang," Johnson recalled recently from Capitol Hill. "He said, 'You're going to Washington' and I said, 'You're out of your mind. I'm not going to Washington. I haven't been there in 14 years.'"

Less than a month later, on Dec. 7, Johnson had accepted the job to oversee Inhofe's Washington office. Johnson would become Inhofe's administrative assistant. "I was literally called out of the oil patch."

Johnson has known Inhofe, who was elected to the Senate for the first time last fall, since 1966. They've worked together on several of Inhofe's political campaigns. Outside of politics, Johnson has over 40 years of experience in the business world. Fifteen of them have been spent as a small independent producer.

Johnson got his start in the oil business in 1982. Today he operates wells in four Oklahoma counties and owns 100 percent of the production. When he came to Washington he divested himself of one company and remains a shareholder of another, in order to comply with Senate disclosure rules.

Johnson left the oil fields of Oklahoma and arrived in the ...